Sink or Float?

Even though it was optional for 2nd Graders, Caleb's teachers challenged him to enter the Science Fair this year. (Thanks a lot!) So, of course he took the challenge and after browsing a few books to get ideas he came up with the idea of testing objects to see if they would sink or float in water. Actually, he wanted to test them in salt water as well, but in the spirit of keeping it simple (for our first OPTIONAL Science project), we decided to just do regular old tap water.

Cute "Aunt Nats", agreed to take pictures of the whole experiment. It was fun to watch Caleb make guesses and then see if he was right--some of them even surprised me. Using pre-punched letters and pre-cut paper scraps (love 'em!), Caleb glued everything down, and had a picture of the object and a picture of it in water, covered by a flap of paper with a question mark on it. Natalie's pictures just took the whole thing up a notch. He analyzed his hypotheses and started writing up his conclusions, but he got hung up on a few simple words. As I tried to prompt him, "This experiment helped me to learn about why objects sink or float", he insisted he did NOT learn WHY they float--just IF they float. So we talked more about what happened in his experiment and a little about mass and density in 2nd grade terms, and he agreed to write "This experiment helped me to learn a little bit about why objects sink or float." This is "typical Caleb" and why I just love how his brain works.

The best award for Caleb was getting his ribbon for participating. The best reward for me was the fact that our relationship didn't SINK in the process!